Word: slime
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...diving bell. A swirl of the dark current and these few strands, looking grayish in the gloom, drift away, leaving the head completely scalped. From the bottom of the chamber sprouts a sticky brown-black beard which runs up the side several feet--a beard of ooze and slime which has spread over the iron skin of the globe in the weeks it lay on the clammy bosom of this watery abyss...
...death and destruction moved with terrifying suddenness over the lovely island, temporary roadside morgues were set up. Many of St. Lucia's 67,000 inhabitants wailed throughout the night as they waited in long lines to identify members of their families. Others insisted upon going into the deep slime, hoping to rescue imbedded relatives. With hundreds of acres of land destroyed, thousands made homeless, St. Lucia next day counted its casualties: at least 250 dead, many more missing. The British Windward Islands administration, with headquarters at St. George's Grenada, faced its greatest relief problem...
Give a biologist a pinch of slime mold-primitive but living protoplasm-and he will have no difficulty predicating an evolutionary ascent, from that bit of animate substance, which leads to large, complex and reasoning beings like himself. Yet the prime question remains: How did the first bit of life appear on earth...
...Slime molds are among the most primitive of living things. Six years ago one of them, a golden yellow mold long known to botanists as Physarum polycephalum, was successfully cultured indoors by Dr. Frank Leslie Howard of Rhode Island State College. Later he turned his molds and his methods over to Dr. Seifriz. Ever since his student days at Johns Hopkins and in England, Germany, Switzerland and France, William Seifriz had hankered for generous supplies of "naked proto-plasm." Physarum polycephalum filled the bill. In a lyrical moment Dr. Seifriz called it a "great big glorious handful...
...Bonaparte had chosen for the coup d'etat that made him Napoleon III, so the novel was lost in the political shuffle. In their fight for fame the brothers encountered even graver difficulties. Rabid anti-romantics, they wrote such painstakingly realistic novels that old-line critics whooped "sculptured slime . . . literature of putrescence." To younger men, such as Emile Zola, the Goncourts were prophetic pioneers. Gradually they built up a literary circle- Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Renan, Taine-who used to meet fortnightly to dine well, talk how they liked. On one of these occasions, Gautier rebuked a silent guest...